Efficient Trust Negotiation based on Trust Evaluations and Adaptive Policies

Automated trust negotiation (ATN) is an approach that establishes mutual trust between strangers wishing to share resources or conduct business by gradually requesting and disclosing digitally signed credentials. Previous work on improving negotiation efficiency mainly focuses on using history negotiation information, which may lead to unnecessary information leakage and cannot improve the negotiation efficiency when both negotiators do not have appropriate history information. Thus in this paper, we enhance the negotiation efficiency from a new aspect, that is, adjust policies based on trust evaluations. An ATN framework is designed to enhance the negotiation efficiency. This framework can simplify the negotiation process, reduce the number of exchanged credentials and credential validations whenever possible. Furthermore, it avoids revealing unnecessary information during negotiations. This framework presents a number of innovative features, such as the support of virtual organizations and trust evaluations, and the use of fine-grained adaptive policies to adjust policies based on the trustworthiness levels. Finally, we report experimental results based on our implementation of this framework, which show that our framework can greatly enhance the negotiation efficiency whenever possible. Index Term—automated trust negotiation, access control policy, trustworthiness level, trust evaluation, efficiency